Current wireless systems, most notably 802.11 wireless local area network (“WLAN”) systems, operate in half-duplex mode on a single frequency. That is, a subscriber in a wireless system either transmits or receives at any given time, but not both simultaneously. Further, the subscriber typically operates on a single frequency. Once a subscriber is on a frequency, it stays on that frequency.
A problem with today's wireless systems is that they only serve one group, where a group is a set of subscribers with common characteristics (e.g., operating on a common frequency band). In the broad case, groups can be large classes of subscribers. Examples of two different groups are city workers and public safety users (e.g., police personnel, fire personnel, or the like). In a technical configuration of the system, and specifically in the case of a WLAN access point (“AP”), the common set of technical characteristics includes frequency, service set identifier (“SSID”), and associations.
To serve multiple groups with existing technology requires multiple APs, which is typically not economically feasible. Further, multiple APs in close proximity exhibit interference issues, which non-deterministically decreases the throughput to both APs (in the best case scenario), and may make the APs completely unusable (in the worst case scenario).
Thus, there exists a need for a single AP to support a plurality of subscribers operating on different frequency bands.